Newish to Watch at Home: Crimson Peak, Trumbo, Grandma, Etc.

Newish on DVD/BluRay

• The 33 Antonio Banderas / Chilean miner rescue story
• 99 Homes the other acclaimed housing crisis movie
• Black Mass the gangster movie with Johnny Depp, buried under alien makeup, plays a gangster. Watch out for great performances on the periphery from Peter Sarsgaard and Julianne Nicholson
• Crimson Peak from Guillermo Del Toro. Critics were divided or had many reservations but those who loved it really loved it. Here's a rabidly pro piece nicely titled "Ghosts are Movies".

LUNCHTIME POLL:
Would you rather...

- Be seduced by Tom Hiddleston?
- Gain access to all of Mia Wasikowska's money?
- Marry into Jessica Chastain's family?

• Girls S4 -I've definitely lost track of this show. Weirdly I quit with an episode I couldn't have loved more (S3E7 "Beach House")
• Grandma - Lily Tomlin gets her own well deserved star vehicle and drives it superbly
• Love the Coopers - Diane Keaton earns a paycheck
• Spectre  -the first Bond I haven't seen in theaters in some time. It just kind of happened, the skipping of it
• Steve Jobs -the intense three act drama starring Michael Fassbender & Kate Winslet
• Togetherness S1 the highly undervalued HBO dramedy. Melanie Lynskey and the rest of the cast are just super
• Trumbo in case you'd like to discover why it did so well in the precursors

NEW TO STREAMING
Netflix added Dope, The Face of Love (a romantic drama misfire from The Bening), Open Season, and the 2007 Best Picture nominee Atonement (tomorrow) and by the end of the month they'll add Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny which looks terrible *sniffle* despite being something we've looked forward to for so long. Amazon Prime added Solomon Kane a fantasy action film starring James Purefoy, Max von Sydow and Rachel Hurd-Wood that Radius TWC buried in 2009 (never opened in the States but played elsewhere). By the end of the month they'll add Digging For Fire from Joe Swanberg.

Which of these will you be catching up with?

Beauty vs Beast: The Witches of Oz

Jason from MNPP here, trying to stop myself from making a deal with the devil to wish this entire week away before it's even really begun -- how can I hold off though? The Witch is out this weekend! I've been clamoring for the Sundance sensation since last year's Sundance, where it was a sensation, LAST YEAR, for Satan's sake. My patience is as worn-thin as the hair on a witch's chinny-chin-chin, yo. Anyway I was bothered and bewildered this morning to see that I have never used the most famous pair of witches of ever for our "Beauty vs Beast" series, so I'd say that it's high time we conjured this contest up (and we're talking about the 1939 film here, so keep Wicked out of it)...

PREVIOUSLY Turns out it wasn't just at the box-office that interest in the Zoolander films turned out to be very unpretty indeed - the contest between Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller's mad sexy creations was pretty uneventful too. It was the male model with the most-est who strutted off with the win though, taking 52% of the vote. Said Steven:

"The reason for Zoolander over Mugatu..... Magnum!!!!"

Blog Wars Episode VIII: Some New Links

• AV Club loves on the dearly departed Bunheads
• Guardian Cynthia Nixon, who plays Emily Dickinson in a new film, thinks she'd have loved social media
• E! Online Dakota Johnson wants Jamie Dornan to bare all in Fifty Shades sequel. (I mean, why not? It's not like he's NSFW shy about it.)
• EW looks at a handful of AMPAS ballots Supporting Actress and Picture votes are all over the place

• Awards Daily on two previous shakeups in Hollywood (the late 1920s) & Academy (the late 1960s) business
• Towleroad Gay Iconography: All About Bette Davis 
• Film School Rejects Ben Stiller's most iconic characters from best to worst 
• Coming Soon Ghostbusters gets a teaser poster. Don't get excited. It's basically just the old logo. Trailer coming on March 3rd
• Coming Soon Salt, Angelina Jolie's would be franchise that never became one headed to TV in series form - without Angie of course
• /Film Alexander Payne lines up his next next film. It's called My Saga, a road trip movie. He still hasn't shot Downsizing with Reese Witherspoon though.

Today's Watch
Daredevil Season 2 Trailer - Pt 1

Elektra and The Punisher get their own trailers, looks like. I'll be disappointed if we don't get a follow up on Madame Gao though, since she was fierce/mysterious. 

• And finally, Star Wars Episode VIII: As Yet Untitled began filming this morning at Pinewood Studios in the UK aiming for the Christmas friendly release date of December 15th, 2017. All the major players, sans Harrison Ford of course, will return. The film is written and directed by Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper) and all the major cast members return (sans Harrison Ford *sniffle*). New cast members will include Benicio Del Toro, newcomer Kelly Marie Tran and 'The Face,' herself Laura Dern! No, wait, that deserves more exclamation points. Laura Dern !!!!!!!!

Equals Poster & Teaser

Manuel here. After premiering at Toronto last year, Drake Doremus's (Like Crazy) sci-fi romance Equals is headed our way soon via A24. And perhaps as a way to dispel the mixed-reaction this Kristen Stewart/Nicholas Hoult flick got at the busy Canadian festival, we've been given two beautiful pieces of marketing: a gorgeous one-sheet poster (with the nevertheless corny tagline, "Find your equal") and a Chromatics-scored teaser trailer that shows us the sleek and slate future Doremus has cooked up.

In case the beautifully bleak futuristic visuals don't give it away, the film centers on a dystopian future where human emotions have been eradicated...or have they? There really is only one way a plot like that develops but it'll make a nice addition to this growing romance-deconstruction-via-sci-fi genre to which Spike Jonze, Alex Garland, and Jonathan Glazer have treated us in these past few years.

Check out the teaser below and discuss with us whether anyone could really resist Hoult's cheekbones, even or especially, when told not to.

Berlin: Fire at Sea

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.

Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro GRA a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.

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